Kiev: No Russians allowed among Donbass peacekeepers

“The peacekeeping mission is not a panacea for restoring peace and stability, just one of the mechanisms”, explained the first deputy speaker of the Verkhovna Rada, the representative of Ukraine in the humanitarian subgroup of the Tripartite Contact Group Irina Gerashchenko.

According to Gerashchenko, Ukraine has insisted on peacekeepers from 2015, but only now this initiative has starting to gain supporters. The mandate of the mission should extend to the entire occupied territory right up to the Ukrainian-Russian border so that peacekeepers control this border.

The mission should also include the accompaniment of peacekeeping processes, monitoring support, assistance in deoccupation, de-escalation and demilitarization of the region

At the same time, Gerashchenko insisted that there should not be Russians in the peacekeeping mission.

Inessa Sinchougova is an Editor and Journalist at Fort Russ News, as well as a research fellow and translator of the Belgrade based think-tank, the Center for Syncretic Studies. She was educated at Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand), in the field of Political Science and was previously employed in Marketing and Communications Strategy for a Multi-National Corporation. She runs a popular YouTube channel for translations of key Russian Foreign Policy figures and appears regularly on other alternative media channels. If you like her work, you can support her Patreon here.